


When Taken Apart

by Amand_r



Category: Torchwood
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-27
Updated: 2011-04-27
Packaged: 2017-10-18 17:54:11
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 689
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/191607
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Amand_r/pseuds/Amand_r
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The diener lays him out like a sweet lamb.</p>
            </blockquote>





	When Taken Apart

The diener lays him out like a sweet lamb.

They align the rib spreader, the drill, the knives with their serrated edges. He is cleaned and sprayed, all but doused with myrrh when they start the examination, fingers crawling over him like a fly might, or an attentive lover. They scrape his fingernails, weigh his body clothed, weigh his body naked, something strange and tinted and not at all familiar, the back and thighs and legs and arms painted with pooled blood like a shadow under the skin.

Jack can't help but wonder what those fingers feel like, when they slide along, clinical, gloved, smelling of talc, looking for tears and marks and wrongness, as if there is anything not wrong about a slab of meat that used to walk and talk being cold as ice.

The skin is parted in letter formation (Y for Yanto, he thinks), pulled back to rest over the face, shoved aside to show what he is like on the inside, all of his chest hair turned inside out almost, until they can examine the trachea and the aesophageus, the nerve system like the fine lines of cracked egg tempura painting, laid out across it all.

When it plays out, Jack crosses his arms across his chest because it is familiar, because it feels like there is more than one of him here; maybe it just compacts him, islets him, makes him travel-sized, perhaps.

Lungs: .88 pounds (399.16 grams)

It becomes a video then, as he watches, a tape that one might just pop into a player at a party, and say, 'Hey, check this out.'

Stomach and contents: 2.28 pounds (1.034 kg)

It's funny, really, when one visits charnel houses and watches them take apart a cow, or a pig, how they hang it upside down by one foot. Sometimes they just mewl, and sometimes they thrash a bit on the hook. Jack had never given it much thought until later, because he usually locks them all away, untouched, blemish free. This one is something he must stand and watch. Something he couldn't keep from destruction even in death.

Heart: .89 pounds (403.69 grams)

Jack rewinds that bit—it's a little thing, when it's pulled free of the carcass like that, loosened and finally snipped and severed like a ship losing an anchor caught on the bottom. It could be a ruby sponge or jewel, clotted blood clumping and falling from the vessels.

Brain: three pounds (1.36077 kg)

When they handle it, it's just a thing, a piece of something. It is what Jack has been waiting for—not the heart with its system mapped and catalogued, not the intestines, unraveled and slit apart, flattened as if they are going to make sausage. This, the brain, the seat of every joke, every innovative thought, every attempt at rescue or a memo, or a hastily written seduction on a post it note. This lump of gray that they weigh, that one might use to make headcheese in another country were he another creature altogether. This thing made Jack coffee and chided him when he was careless.

When they don't replace it, but put it in a special container for biopsy and stuff his head with newspaper, that is when Jack stops the recording, because really he has seen it, the thing he wanted. Ianto's brain and heart laid open and bandied about like a bundle of rump roasts. He would have told Jack that that is all there is, really, right before he might have slammed a magazine into his gun or pulled the car unto a U-turn and blown Jack in the passenger seat. _That is all we are Jack,_ he might have said, but he wouldn't have meant it. His eyes would have said that he hadn't meant it.

Jack uploads the video to his wrist strap. He watches it once a year for ten years, just to remind himself.

He'll rediscover it fifteen hundred years later, and he won't know what it means. It's a morbid thing, and he needs the space.

He deletes it.

END


End file.
